The Endymion Ensemble's concert at Hoxton Hall as part of the Hoxton New Music Days was a celebration of the musical miniature. Not surprisingly, the perfectly formed shards of Gyorgy Kurtag's music featured prominently. In SK Remembrance Noise, soprano Sarah Leonard was joined by violinist Marshall Marcus in settings of haiku-like lines by Dezso Tandori. In conventional terms, each 30-second piece is a musical fragment, no more complete than a page ripped out from a larger structure. But Kurtag creates self-sufficient poetic experiences within this ultra-compressed time frame.
Road to Damascus was a gradual - a relative term in Kurtag's music - increase in intensity and volume in both voice and violin parts. After the climax, the violin reached a point of stasis, and quietly intoned the limits of the journey just undertaken. A contrast between two kinds of musical time, and a resonant suggestion of a Damascene transformation from darkness to light - all in less time than it takes to describe what happened.
Kurtag's music is a touchstone for creating drama and conflict in small-scale pieces. Works by Kaija Saariaho and Per Norgard took a different approach, luxuriating in the textures of particular instrumental combinations. Saariaho's Oi Kuu fused a bass clarinet and cello together, creating a virtual instrument in the intersection between the bass clarinet's breathiness and the cello's half-formed bow-strokes. Norgard's Lark Song was a playful meditation on a simple, tonal melody for flute, violin and cello.
Andrew Hamilton's soprano + horn =, a first performance, cut up a text by Jasper Johns and set it to a similarly scarified music of rhythmic insistence. Music by Oliver Knussen and Harrison Birtwistle framed the concert - Knussen's expressive, keening settings of poems by Rilke for solo soprano, and Birtwistle's Monody, for soprano and ensemble. At around 10 minutes long, this piece sounded extravagantly large-scale in comparison with the rest of the concert.
A late-night recital of solo works for violin and viola continued the Hoxton New Music Days' Bach and Today series, with three works of enormous difficulty and ambition. Robin Holloway's solo viola sonata, another world premiere, defined an idiomatic world of melancholy invention that Paul Silverthorne communicated with conviction. David Le Page's performances of Bach and Luciano Berio were impressive feats of stamina and technique. After the tortuous complexities of the Adagio and Fugue from Bach's C major sonata, Le Page followed with Berio's Sequenza VIII. Hearing the pieces in succession, it was the Bach that sounded the more impossible and labyrinthine; Berio's music was positively accessible by comparison.
***** Unmissable **** Recommended *** Enjoyable ** Mediocre * Terrible
